Various User Interfaces (“UIs”) are known for managing and manipulating documents and other objects on computing devices. One type of UI displays a list of Most Recently Used (“MRU”) objects. For example, word processors often display a list of most recently used documents and operating systems often display a list of most recently used applications. Displaying such a list allows expedited access to recently used objects. Users may simply navigate a menu rather than, for example, a series of dialogue boxes to navigate through a file path. Such a list may display, for instance, the ten most recently used objects. Typically, this list is displayed as a text based menu item at the bottom of the application's top-level File menu or from an “Open Recent>” fly-out menu under the top-level File menu. While this UI may be convenient for a user accustomed to looking in the top-level File menu for MRU files, it does not lend itself well to a task-based UI.
A task-based UI makes tasks, not files and folders, the primary unit of interaction. Instead of showing entire hierarchies of information, such as a trees of files or file paths, a task-based UI typically displays icons with task-oriented phrases or images related to the task-at-hand, for example “Make New Drawing”, “Open Existing Drawing” or “Organize Pictures”. A task-based UI tends to be user friendly because users tend to use applications to accomplish tasks. These tasks are configured to be in line with what a user might be thinking at the moment they launch an application. In other words, users tend to think in terms of tasks that they want to accomplish as opposed to documents. Therefore, task-based UIs have become popular.
This task-based approach is convenient for an application that deals with a single type of file. For example, “Cover Flow”, the animated UI integrated with many APPLE COMPUTERS, INC.™ products, displays icons to a user representing both the task of playing, i.e., rendering, a media file and the underlying media file. This UI works well when there is only one task to be accomplished, rendering in this example. However, the convenience of this approach wanes when an application allows a user to perform multiple tasks or author multiple types of files or documents. Such an application may include multiple modules of varying types, for example a text module to create document objects, an image module to create image objects, a layout module to create layout objects, a letter module to create letter objects, a rule module to create rule objects, and a portfolio module to create portfolio objects. Each of these types represents a task, however they also each represent a type of file, document, or other object that a user may use or author.
In the case of applications dealing with multiple object types, the traditional menu-based MRU system is cumbersome, to say the least. Additionally, the traditional task-based UI either takes up too much screen real estate to be usable (e.g., having a set of icons representing each set of tasks you might want to perform per document type) or non-intuitive tasks are combined together (e.g., to reduce the number of icons). For example, while Cover Flow is convenient for user interfaces that only require navigation of media files (i.e. only of files that may be considered the same type), it would become difficult to use with files of diverse file types (e.g., files that cannot be merely rendered with a media player).